Statement  2024-02

I have been an artist for over 20 years after graduating in Fine Art in 2003. I have been based in Liverpool, Hull, Bristol, London, currently Dublin and soon Helsinki. I have participated in many group and solo exhibitions as well as curated group shows.

Alongside my art practice, I have worked as an art technician, working with numerous artists and curators, installing many exhibitions at high profile art institutions and universities. This has served as a second education, directly informing and influencing my art practice.

A significant reference point is early 20th century painting, with its focus on melding scientific thinking with art and the impulse of Modernism. Artists such as Paul Klee, the early work of Léger and Cézanne in particular. The current digital art movement shows parallels to the early 20th century epoch in terms of technology raising consciousness to another level.

From 2010-2021, I used video as the source material for physical paintings. Drawing was done while viewing live video and the subsequent drawings contained a certain immediacy, which carried through into meticulously worked acrylic paintings, using masking as a means of quantifying form.

I see pixel art as an extension of painting, where the previous image-generation processes are carried through, but are taken further by utilising the liberating tools of infinite reworking, animation, copy-pasting and dithering. There are many current digital artists who fascinate and influence including Gio Mariani, Edmarola, Sabato, Stalomir, cap’n, haydiroket, elbi, lubitel bliznih, Kerim Safa and Francoise Gamma to name but a few…

The digital art scene is incredibly exciting, rewarding and emancipating, especially when compared to the tightly gate-kept traditional art world. The support of other artists, the ease of collecting each others work as well as the option to have editions and the royalty system, for the first time enabling artists to be truly independent and not reliant upon galleries.

All of my work is freehand drawn with a tablet, utilising my own colour palette, which was based on PICO-8 and new tones are added with each piece. My process references photos of places I have been and fuses them with current interests including ancient technologies, past and future lives, multiple universes, a questioning of science and all experience beyond that of the human senses. The grand aim, knowingly idealistic, is to understand how the universe works. 

All current work is now exhibited at objkt.com